1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to a data processing system and more particularly to a system for providing data management services over the Internet.
2. Background Art
In conventional customer enabled reporting and data management systems, a connection is made with a large legacy system via a dial-up connection from a customer owned personal computer or work station. This connection frequently, although not always, emulates a terminal addressable by the legacy system. The dial-up access requires custom software on the customer workstation to provide dial-up services, communication services, emulation and/or translation services and generally some resident custom form of the legacy application to interface with the mid range or mainframe computer running the legacy system.
There are several problems associated with this approach:
First, the aforementioned software is very hardware specific, and customers generally have a wide range of workstation vendors, which requires extensive inventory for distribution, and generally, intensive customer hand holding through initial setup and installation before reliable and secure sessions are possible. If the customer hardware platform changes through an upgrade, most of these issues need renegotiation.
Secondly, dial-up, modem, and communications software interact with each other in many ways which are not always predictable to a custom application, requiring extensive trouble shooting and problem solving for an enterprise wishing to make the legacy system available to the customer, particularly where various telephone exchanges, dialing standards or signal standards are involved.
Third, when an enterprise wishes to make more than one system available to the customer, the custom application for one legacy system is not able to connect to a different legacy system, and the customer must generally logoff and logon to switch from one to the other. The delivery technology used by the two legacy systems may be different, requiring different interface standards, and different machine level languages may be used by the two systems, as for example, the 96 character EBCDIC language used by IBM, and the 127 character ASCII language used by contemporary personal computers.
Finally, the security and entitlement features of the various legacy systems may be completely different, and vary from system to system and platform to platform.
It is therefore desired to provide connectivity to enterprise legacy systems providing data management services over the public Internet, as the Internet provides access connectivity world wide via the TCP/IP protocol, without a need to navigate various telephone exchanges, dialing standards or signal standards.
One such type of legacy system is used for a telecommunications industry and provides a data reporting services to larger customers of the enterprise. In the context of telecommunications services and products offered by large telecommunications network service providers for their customers, the assignee of the present invention, MCI, has deployed an MCI ServiceView (xe2x80x9cMSVxe2x80x9d) platform comprising a number of independent legacy systems enabling dial-up connectivity for those customers desiring to obtain the following network management service and reporting data pertaining to their telecommunications networks: priced call detail data and reporting; toll-free network manager xe2x80x9c800NMxe2x80x9d call routing data; outbound network management data; trouble ticket information; fault manager alarms. Limited interactive toll free network control is additionally supported whereby customers may change the configuration of their toll-free networks and xe2x80x9cvirtualxe2x80x9d networks, i.e., Vnet networks. In addition to the MSV platform, the present assignee has implemented a variety of stand alone applications including: a Traffic View system enabling customers to perform real-time network traffic monitoring of their toll-free networks, and obtain near-real time call detail data and reports, and, a xe2x80x9cHyperscopexe2x80x9d reporting system for providing reports on the performance of customers"" Broadband (data) networks.
More particularly, MCI""s ServiceView platform (xe2x80x9cMSVxe2x80x9d) provides for the generation of Toll-free Network Management data, priced call detail (xe2x80x9cPerspectivexe2x80x9d) data for usage analysis and trending, each of which requires a different reporting mechanism due to the nature of the data being presented. Such reporting systems typically do not provide any report customization or presentation options for the customer, and any reporting customization is provided by an application specific program running on the client workstation. Furthermore, such systems do not readily provide for the scheduling of periodic or ad hoc xe2x80x9cone-shotxe2x80x9d reports.
Thus, what is needed is a comprehensive system that provides customers with simplified access to a data management relating to products and/or services provided by an enterprise. This comprehensive system should not be limited in its application to enterprises which provide telecommunications network management services, but should be generally applicable in enterprises offering various products and services, such as manufacturing industries, utilities companies, and/or enterprises providing courier services, etc., providing the customers with a standard online access and management tools to the various information and data relating to the services and/or products to which they have subscribed from the enterprise.
The rapid adoption and use of the Internet for data exchange has prompted a desire on the part of customers to access their data over the Internet. The popularity of the public Internet provides a measure of platform independence for the customer, as the customer can run their own Internet Web-browser and utilize their own platform connection to the Internet to enable service. This resolves many of the platform hardware and connectivity issues in the customers favor, and lets the customer choose their own platform and operating system. Web-based programs can minimize the need for training and support since they utilize existing client software which the user has already installed and already knows how to use, i.e., the browser. Further, if the customer later changes that platform, then, as soon as the new platform is Internet enabled, service is restored to the customer. The connectivity and communications software burden is thus resolved in favor of standard and readily available hardware and the browser and dial-up software used to obtain and establish a public Internet connection.
An Internet delivered paradigm obviates many of the installation and configuration problems involved with initial setup and configuration of a customer workstation, since the custom application required to interface with the legacy system can be delivered via the public Internet and run within a standard Web-browser, reducing application compatibility issues to browser compatibility issues.
For the enterprise, the use of off-the-shelf Web browsers by the customer significantly simplifies the enterprise burden by limiting the client development side to screen layouts and data presentation tools that use a common interface enabled by the Web browser. Software development and support resources are thus available for the delivery of the enterprise legacy services and are not consumed by a need for customer support at the work station level.
Thus, it would be highly desirable to provide an integrated system that provides for secure remote connectivity to enterprise legacy systems over the public Internet. The public Internet provides access connectivity world wide via the TCP/IP protocol, without need to navigate various disparate security protocols, telephone exchanges, dialing standards or signal standards, thereby providing a measure of platform independence for the customer.
Furthermore, it would be desirable to provide an Intranet/Internet/Web-based reporting system that provides a common GUI enabling both report requesting, customizing, scheduling and viewing of various types of data from different back-end services and applications.
It would also be highly desirable to provide a Intranet/Internet/Web-based data management system infrastructure capable of providing the enterprise""s products and services data to customer""s over the Intranet and/or Extranet.
The present invention is directed to a Web-based, integrated customer interface system for data management. The customer interface system is provided with a graphical user interface for enabling a user to interact with one or more services provided by remote servers located in an Intranet/Extranet of an enterprise providing products and services, and utilizes a Web paradigm to allow easy and convenient access to all of the services from the user""s perspective.
In the preferred embodiment, the data management products and services delivered to a client workstation having the integrated customer interface include: 1) report requester, report viewer, and report management applications enabling a customer to request, specify, customize and schedule delivery of reports pertaining to customer""s data; 2) centralized inbox system for providing on-line reporting, presentation, and notifications to a client workstation from one or more Intranet application services over an Internet/Intranet network; 3) an operational data storage system implementing a data mart approach for maintaining the data used for customer reporting; 4) a trouble ticket tool enabling a customer to open and monitor trouble tickets relating to products and services provided by an enterprise; 5) a Web-based invoice reporting system allowing the customers access to their billing and invoice reports associated with services provided to a customer; 6) an Internet xe2x80x9conlinexe2x80x9d order entry and administration service to enable customers to manage their accounts; and, 7) a system for handling security and authentication requests from both client and server side of the applications implementing the suite of data management products and services.
Integrated within the customer interface system is an application backplane unit for controlling and managing the overall user interface system to a number of Web enabled application services. By invoking the backplane unit a user may receive a number of disparate services available from the remote servers.
Each remote service provided includes its own user interface unit, referred to as a client application, independently implemented of one another and the backplane. Although the client applications are independently developed as separate modules, the interface of the present invention integrates the client applications into one unified system, allowing users to access the individual client applications via the backplane unit. Thus, the present invention provides interoperability between each of the client applications and the backplane, as well as among each of the client applications.
Accordingly, the present invention provides an integrated customer interface and Web-based delivery system for delivering to customers a number of products and services available from remote servers, wherein separate client applications may communicate with one another and with the backplane unit.
Thus, in accordance with the principles of the invention, there is provided an integrated system for providing one or more data management services relating to products and services provided by an enterprise to customers over the public Internet, the data management services accessible from a client workstation employing a client browser associated with a customer and capable of receiving Web pages from a service/product provider of the data management services. The system includes one or more secure Web servers for managing one or more secure client sessions over the Internet in response to user entry into the system, each Web server supporting secure communications with the client workstation. During the initiation of a customer session, a logon Web page is downloaded to the client workstation from the one or more Web servers. According to the customer""s entry on the logon Web page, the customer is authenticated by a remote authentication server, a component of the present invention. The customer is then presented with another Web page, a home page, which includes integrated customer interfaces to remote application services according to pre-determined customer entitlements. Each customer interface is associated with a data management services and enables interactive Web/Internet based communications with the Web servers. Each Web server supports communication of messages entered via the integrated customer interface to one or more remote data management application server providing associated data management capabilities. The messages include: i) requests for information pertaining to a customer""s products and/or services, ii) directives for modifying a customer""s data assets. The remote data management application server processes the requests or directives and provides responses to the one or more Web server(s) for secure downloading to the customer workstation for display via said integrated interface.
Advantageously, the integrated customer interface implementing an Internet delivered paradigm for data management services obviates many of the installation and configuration problems involved with initial setup and configuration of a dial-up customer workstation, since the custom application required to interface with the legacy system can be delivered via the public Internet and run within a standard Web-browser, reducing application compatibility issues to browser compatibility issues.
Further features and advantages of the present invention as well as the structure and operation of various embodiments of the present invention are described in detail below with reference to the accompanying drawings. In the drawings, like reference numbers indicate identical or functionally similar elements.